Hello everyone! I've briefly stopped the development of the core mechanics of Winds of Trade to focus on making a road mesh generation tool. One of the features I'll be adding to WoT in the future involves cities being connected by roads, so they can trade goods by ground transportation and not only via the maritime trading companies the player and their competitors manage.

So, I decided it would be a good opportunity to: a) Test my algebra skills and see if they are still sharp; and b) Releasing a new open-source tool to the wonderful Unity Engine community.

Here is a small preview showcasing some of the features of Roadifier, the tool I'm making to generate road meshes that automatically follow terrain height and terrain normals. As soon as it's ready for release it will be announced here and uploaded to a GitHub repository.

With the release of the 0.6 version of Winds of Trade, most of the business simulation and economic models of the game were pretty much finished. So I decided it was time to start working on a whole different aspect of the game: combat. I knew I wanted it to be turn-based instead of real-time, in order to provide two completely different gameplay experiences to the player. I also knew I wanted it to be based in an hexagonal grid. So the end result turned up to be something quite similar to the battle system of games such as Heroes of Might and Magic III.

After doing all of the basic stuff, like implementing the hex grid itself, an incredibly simple AI and allowing the player to move their own ships I started working with a good friend of mine on some visual improvements and UI stuff. The main objective was to make it look like a game that was not released in the 90s.

Then, I started to focus on adding more UI elements in order to make it playable. I added a status bar in the bottom an…

Recently I have noticed that the main menu of Winds of Trade was a bit neglected. I made that thing a long time ago, almost as a placeholder, and pretty much forgot about it. A few days ago I received the new soundtrack for the title screen from a briliant musician who's working with me, so I thought it was a nice opportunity to improve the main menu. After all, that's exactly the first thing a player sees when they start a game!

First of all, I added some more movement to the background. Before making these changes I had a static camera sitting there while ships came and went. I decided to go for a more 'cinematic' approach and make the camera move around different scenes, synchronizing the transitions to the music. I also added an image effect that makes the background look like an "animated painting" if that makes any sense.

Here are a few examples:

I also made a few improvements to the "start new game" flow, so now the player can choose the name…

Version 0.6 is almost here and some very exciting things have been taking place lately. Some of the most interesting changes the game has suffered in these past few weeks are:

As I promised in a previous post, Winds of Trade now has colonies! Yes, finally your company can use the political and economical leverage to found new settlements in order to exploit natural resources. You can then create your very own supply chains in order to control the market. Several changes to improve the overall user experience. The most important one was switching the font to one that's a lot more readable, especially in small screen sizes. New procedurally generated rocks in the ocean. These new obstacles add some variety to the generated worlds and force your ships to take different routes in order to avoid them.
Coming soon: a new ship type (the frigate), new music and some more improvements to the economic simulation! :D

Lately I've been quite busy working on Winds of Trade v0.6. This is a major milestone for the development, as it will be the first version of Winds of Trade that will be distributed to many different people in order to get their feedback. So far I had only done that with people close to me. It will also be the first version of the game that will have its economy simulation pretty much complete. If nothing goes awry, it should be ready to be shipped by the end of the month.

Some of the most interesting features this version will include are:

Production, consumption and price simulation for 20 different commodities, including sugar, cigars, opium, iron, wood and paper.Stock market with companies that produce and consume resources in the game world, so you can help them succeed in order to maximize your profits.With enough money and political leverage your trading company can establish new colonies around the world in order to exploit natural resources and give you an advantage over y…

Once again, I have lots of very exciting updates to share with all of you! I have finished working on v0.5 of Winds of Trade and started the wonderful road towards v0.6, which will probably be the first version to go out as an open beta. No promises for the time being, though. Some of the most interesting updates are:

Now you can invest in the stock market and borrow money from the bank. Simply put, more resources to make your company great!New "smuggling" contracts: you can now help your local shady man get illegal goods - such as opium - and get huge rewards. But be careful, if you fail there will be consequences...New ship type: Bermuda SloopNew main menu music. It's lovely, I promise!Brand new industries screen, showing what's produced and consumed in every city.Huge performance improvements to the random world generation process.Hotkeys for changing the game speed (F1 through F3)Several UI improvements and bug fixes.
I have also released a copy of the game for so…

Hello everyone! I know, it's been months since the last time I wrote in this dev blog... But I haven't been staring at the ceiling or watching the grass grow, I made a lot of progress in Winds of Trade, I swear! I'll write about that later, though.

First of all, let's start with the finished result so you can have a notion of what I'm talking about:

So, basically I have a two-dimensional array where I store what country owns each square in the map and I had to generate labels for them. I wanted to achieve something similar to what Europa Universalis 4 does but using straight labels instead of curved ones in order to make implementation easier. So I needed an algorithm capable of:

1) Identifying every contiguous region in the map.
2) Finding the best orientation (rotation) for the label.
3) Deciding where to place the label.
4) Cho…

What is WoT?

Winds Of Trade is a strategy game about running an ocean trading company in the 18th and 19th centuries. Building your trading empire will not be your only goal! Ruthless pirates, shady smugglers, wartime and fierce competitors will make the way to the top a long and hard road for you!